Debate

Dear Voyeur, meet Flneur Sincerely, Social

Media

danah boyd
Microsoft Research and Harvard University, USA. e-mail: dmb@microsoft.com web: http://www.danah.org/

There are times and places where people like being watched. And there are times and places when people
like watching. Technology brings the flneur and the voyeur together in new ways, constructing
multibillion-dollar industries that profit off of their symbiotic relationship. From reality TV to Facebook,
the flneur and the voyeur come together to see and be seen. Yet, for all that people like being watched
and for all that people like watching, there are limits to their comfort. Critical questions commonly
emerge: whos watching? For what purposes? What are the potential benefits or consequences of watching
or being watched? These are precisely the questions that Surveillance Studies bring to bear.
Implicit in any conversation about surveillance is the issue of structural power. Institutions and entities
watch people. Challenges to surveillance also tend to focus on responses to structural power, as people
interrogate institutions and entities. Yet, there are different forms of power at stake when we think about
the watcher and the watched. Most importantly, there is situational power. People hold power over each
other not simply through authority but through their interaction dynamic at any given point in time,
watching and then being watched. Some situations enable people to maintain power when watching while
others require people to make themselves vulnerable in order to watch. Likewise, technologies enable
different configurations and with different outcomes. What Facebook enables is quite different than what
is made possible by reality TV.
When critics think about the production of reality TV shows or the creation of Facebook, they typically
focus on the institutions behind these entities and, thus, focus on the structural power that can be abused.
But when people talk about invasions of privacy on sites like Facebook, they are not just talking about
structural power; in fact, more often than not, theyre talking about situational power. Theyre talking
about how peopleincluding and, especially, people that they knowcan hold power over them in a
particular moment. They feel violated when they are taken out of context against the social norms that
regulate the situation.
In his seminal book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, legal scholar Larry Lessig (2000) argued that
systems are regulated by four different regulatory pressures: the market, the law, code (or architecture),
and social norms. Most conversations about privacy and surveillance focus on the role that the law can
or shouldplay in curbing abuses of privacy by the market and the government because of available
technology. Social norms are bandied about as a justification for nearly any approach with rhetoric like
Privacy norms are changing and People do (or dont) care about privacy. Yet, social normswhen
contextually understoodhighlight how privacy and surveillance are both being challenged by an
increasingly networked society.
boyd, danah. 2011. Dear Voyeur, meet Flneur Sincerely, Social Media. Surveillance & Society 8(4):
505-507.
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org | ISSN: 1477-7487
The author, 2011 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

boyd: Dear Voyeur, meet Flneur Sincerely, Social Media

Bennetts essay, In defence of privacy, clearly articulates how unclear privacy is as a concept and why
privacy, in its slippery state, fails to serve as an antidote to surveillance. At a regulatory level, his
argument is persuasiveoperationalizing a term that no one can agree upon is impossible. Likewise, he
responsibly highlights a simple reality: people like to think about, talk about, and work towards defining
privacy. In short, privacy is cool and, pragmatically, leveraging privacy discourse has its advantages.
While I agree with Bennetts assessments, I would argue that there is an additional reason that surveillance
scholars should engage with privacy discourse: its messiness actually has value.
In trying to describe different facets of privacy, Bennett highlights that one of the greatest weaknesses of
discourse about privacy is that its individual-centric. He uses Valerie Steeves (2008) critique to highlight
how privacy is a dynamic, socially constructed process. Meanwhile, he argues that surveillance offers a
better angle with which to think about violations that arent well captured by privacy, in part because
surveillance provides a framework for thinking about groups and categories. Of course, Steeves critique
also applies to a surveillance model that is group-centric. To resolve Steeves challenge, it becomes
critical to not only understand the role of social interactions but also the networks in which people inhabit.
Helen Nissenbaum (2009) captures this as context, but it is important to highlight that context, in her
sense, is more than just a definition of the situation; its about the relationship people have to people,
information, technology, space, and time. Peoples understandings of privacy and surveillance are very
much driven by position in the various networks, and their interactions with others are shaped by these
relationships. Technology only makes the networks more salient, both to those watching and those being
watched.
People develop different strategies to manage realities in which they are observed. While there is little
doubt that surveillance affects peoples behaviour (Foucault 1975), people are also quite creative in
finding ways to manage being watched so as to achieve privacy. Let me offer two examples in the form of
case studies derived from my ethnographic work:
Case #1: Carmen, a 17-year-old Latina girl living in Boston, was having a bad day. She
and her boyfriend broke up and she wanted her friends to know that she was feeling sad.
Her first instinct was to post a sappy song lyric to her Facebook, but she decided against
doing so out of fear that her mother would take it seriously and think she was suicidal.
Instead, she chose song lyrics from Always Look on the Bright Side of Life knowing
that her mother wouldnt recognize the song or the reference while her friends would
immediately recognize that this song was sung in The Life of Brian when the main
character was about to be executed.
Case #2: Shamika, a 17-year-old black girl living in DC, found that Facebook was often
the source of social drama at her school. After a fight in which a girl had taken older posts
of Shamikas out of context to justify her bullish actions, Shamika decided that status
updates should be ephemeral. Each day, she white walls her Facebook profile, deleting
comments left by others after she reads them and removing status updates or wall posts
that are more than a day old. In this way, Shamika keeps a living profile on Facebook but
undermines the norm of persistence.
Both Shamika and Carmen have accepted that theyre being watched. Thats part of why they like
Facebook in the first placethey want the attention of being watched by people that they know and like.
But just because they like being watched does not mean that they inherently want people that they know to
hold power over them. Shamika focuses on limiting access to older content. She is perfectly aware of the
fact that anyone could save her profile content and that Facebook itself most likely has a record of the
content, but thats not the point. Shes intentionally making access harder to reduce the drama that can

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ensue when it is too easy to access content and take it out of temporal context. Shes trying to achieve
control, not invisibility.
Carmen is taking a different approach. Shes not trying to restrict access to content, but trying to limit
access to interpretation. This can best be understood as a social steganography technique; Carmen is
hiding in plain sight, assuming that anyone can access what she is saying but that only some people
understand the meaning. She relies on the fact that her mother doesnt recognize song lyrics let alone
bother to look them up: she takes text at face value. Meanwhile, Carmen also assumes that anyone who
knows the Monty Python movie but doesnt know her wont understand why shes posting the lyrics in the
first place. In controlling the meaning, Carmen asserts agency over the social situation.
What is at stake in any conversation about privacy or surveillance is not simply power but agency. When
and to what degree can individuals assert agency over a situation? Consider the position of celebrities who
are under constant surveillance by paparazzi and others who demand that they have the right to access
them as public figures. When Angelina Jolie married Billy Bob Thornton, the press frenzy around her was
intense. She willingly exposed many aspects of her life, fuelling the fire. At one point, a journalist asked
Angelina about her decision to be so public and reject any privacy that she might possibly have. Angelina
responded by telling the reporter that the best way to achieve privacy was to appear to be so public that no
one bothered looking into areas that she wanted to protect. Celebrities cant escape being watched, but
they can divert attention.
Social technologies are undoing the private-by-default, public-through-effort norm that average people
have when walking through this world. Participation in digital social media often means public-by-default,
private-through-effort. Being watched is simply part and parcel with participating. Rather than opting out
or going off the grid, many participants are developing techniques to manage the dynamics that
celebrities have faced for a long timelife under a constant state of surveillance. What gives them power
is not technology or legal regimes, but agency.
In focusing on agency, it is possible to recognize the role of networks. People arent simply individuals or
in groups; they are members of social networks, connected by information, time, and space, and they must
navigate life as a series of relationships. When people understand their position in the constellation, they
can then achieve the very essence of what privacy is all about. Furthermore, only when they have agency
can people respond rationally and responsibly to surveillance.
References
Foucault, M. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Lessig, L. 2000. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.
Nissenbaum, H. 2009. Privacy in Context: Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Steeves, V. 2008. Reclaiming the Social Value of Privacy, in I. Kerr (ed.) Lessons from the Identity Trail. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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